When it’s cold it’s normal to eat more: our body needs more calories to resist low temperatures. Despite this, this does not mean that you should be tempted and send healthy eating to dormancy until spring. On the contrary, winter is precisely the perfect season to not gain weight or, even better, to start a diet, or not leave it if you are following it. If you start now, there will be a better chance that you will achieve your goal, because your body will gradually get used to the change.
What’s more, with so much time available for dieting, you can lose weight in a healthy way without risk and without having to make last-minute efforts to get into your swimsuit in June. Eating healthy, in addition to helping us lose that, strengthens the immune defenses and helps keep us away from the typical diseases of this season such as the flu or colds.
What to do to not gain weight during the winter?
Holidays aside, this is the perfect time to start. What do you say? Marta Abardia, nutritionist at Manzanaroja, your personalized diet and head of the Barcelona Nutritionists center, gives you the keys to not only not gain weight in winter but also to lose weight in a balanced way at this time of year.
Does the cold make you lazy and you daydream about eating and drinking wine in front of a fireplace? Drink herbal teas and prepare healthy and light soups with seasonal vegetables!
- Have you canceled the pool subscription and you are not going to run? Is your preferred position to be comfortably seated on the sofa? You have no excuse! Give yourself an early Christmas gift and buy yourself an exercise bike to train at home.
- The days are getting shorter, the rain gets you down and your only consolation is food? Get out of this vicious circle and have fun with friends.
- Low winter temperatures force our body to spend more energy to ensure body temperature. The most caloric foods are fatty and perhaps for this reason our body tends to look for them. To avoid them, prepare vegetable, legume and cereal soups. They are complete and healthy dishes that satisfy, but without shooting up the calories.
- During the winter, with the holidays, there is a tendency to make fewer sacrifices and to let yourself go at the table. If you start taking care of yourself today, you will make fewer sacrifices tomorrow.
- In winter people tend to meet in bars to have tea or hot chocolate (almost always accompanied by a sweet). In addition, as the days are shorter, the character of the depressive personality tends to be accentuated, and, therefore, the search for gratifying actions, such as eating food. Propose to your friends walks in the park or in the woods and if you are going to have something that is tea, infusion or non-alcoholic beer. No sugary drinks and limit alcohol.
- Winter is the right time not only to compensate and limit the natural tendency to consume more calories, but also to start getting fit for summer. Start now a personalized nutrition and physical activity plan, tailored to your needs, your tastes and your pace.
- Unlike what happens in summer, in winter we are not tempted to eat fresh and refreshing foods such as fruit (also because in winter there is less variety), so our mind is more inclined to eat hot and more caloric foods. Include fruit in a mid-morning and mid-afternoon snack or accompany your dishes with a large open and seasoned salad tomato. Also try setting a reminder on your mobile to drink more, take breaks every half hour to get up to drink water, make infusions of any kind without adding sugar or drink vegetable broths.
- To cope well with winter, our body needs vitamins. Among the most necessary is vitamin D (which we find in milk, eggs, cheese, fish), because the little sun this season is not enough to activate the vitamin D in our skin. Vitamin C is also very important for its nutritional role, as well as for mucous membranes, for collagen and for the proper functioning of the immune system (put to the test by the attack of flu viruses). It is important that you remember that it is necessary to take a basic dose of all the vitamins and that, for this, we must eat plenty of fruit and a variety of vegetables.